My Balance One router is using firmware version 8.4.1. In addition, my home network is physically disconnected from the internet between the hours of 10 PM and 8 AM.
On March 22, 2020, forum member Michael234 posted a question entitled “Two oddities monitoring router activity with no clients”. He wrote that his Surf SOHO was making contact with IP addresses 104.25.204.4 and 104.25.205.4, both at 3:10 AM. He suspected that the first IP address might belong to Peplink. He asked about the second IP address (which he also suspected might belong to Peplink) if this phoning home was scheduled for once a day in the middle of the night (as per local time zone).
Peplink Team member TK_Liew replied that the first IP address is from download.peplink.com and is used for updating various databases: (1) CA certificates (for making verified secured TLS connections), (2) Geo and SaaS firewall rules, and (3) Content Blocking categories updates.
Peplink Team member TK_Liew replied to the second IP address phoning home by stating: “Yes. The device will update the databases daily.”.
Considering that my home network is physically disconnected from the internet between the hours of 10 PM and 8 AM, my questions are:
(1) Can I, as the router administrator, manually download the various databases mentioned above at a time of my choosing? If yes, how?
(2) Can I, as the router administrator, change the 3:10 AM time to another time, perhaps 7:00 PM, for when the router downloads the various database updates? If yes, how?
(3) If I can’t manually download the various databases and I can’t change the 3:10 AM download time, what are the long term consequences for the performance and usability of my Balance One router?
(4) Are there other options I might consider for updating the various databases?